CATEG implements a Call Center with Elastix

CATEG implements a Call Center with Elastix

CATEG, Guayaquil Electricity Company,  needed bill processing and debt consultations from their clients through an inbound call center. They also needed to unify the dialing plan between headquarters and all of its branches with a High Availability solution.

CATEG

Ecuador

PaloSanto Solutions
Author: Alfredo Zambrano - ECE

The Solution was implemented in three CATEG agencies, two of them with an ELX-025 Elastix Appliance, and one agency with a cluster solution consisting of one ELX-3000 and one ELX-025. This solution works with a 2E1 Redfone, for the integration of 2 E1 PRI from the telephony provider.

The North agency initially had an ELX-025 with 25 concurrent calls capacity, but they saw a substantial increase in users and therefore integrate the ELX-3000 to expand the solution.

The objective of the three implementations was to allow the client to consult billing information at a new CATEG call center. To achieve this objective an IVR was configured to allow the subscriber to enter the invoice number and get the amount of the debt. When the customer enters the requested information, a connection is made with an Oracle database to get information and results. This database is managed by the system department of every agency.

According to statistics obtained by the reporting module, the demand for this application is around 100 to 150 visits per day.

 

"Elastix allows us to gain a stable platform that is fully compatible out-of-the-box with modern hardware such as PCI express and Serial ATA and allows proper use of interrupt management features like APCI. All of this without losing the PBX features you have come to love. In addition with Elastix you gain new features such as integrated HylaFax server, fully integrated communications and more flexibility through the Web UI"

Rhino Equipment Corp.

USA

How is the leader in call center World?

The Philippines are expected to overtake India as the call center capital of the world, a recent study by Everest Research Institute indicated.

The Philippines' call center common revenues are going to reach $5.7 billion this year or $200 million more compared to India's $5.5 billion. Business Process Outsourcing revenues are predicted to outreach $9.5 billion, thus catching-up to India's $12.4 billion. The Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) noted that surpassing India in the call center business was not "far-fetched" as more companies based there are moving their operations in the Philippines. The migrating to the Philippines is associated with basic factors: the country's existing and potential workforce has better English-speaking performance, the country’s telecommunications networks are of considerably better performance than of India, and Filipinos' affinity with the American mentality. Of course, in terms of sizes, India far outweighs the Philippines. India has started to work in the BPO industry 10 years ahead of the Philippines. The Philippines’ workforce is no match to India’s, given their total population of 92 million and 1 billion, respectively, a BPAP executive has said in a recent interview. Among the list of services currently offered by outsourcing companies, such as those stationed in the Philippines, the voice-based or the traditional call center sector has one of the lowest profit margins. Amongst several transfigurations of the BPO business model is to have the low-end call center services in the Philippines, which has cultural affinity with the mostly American clients, while the up-market technical services are located in India. A multi-country model also fits well for outsourcing companies concerned about managing their business' local country risks. The Indian industry group National Association of Software and Service Companies, or NASSCom, and the BPAP keep ties for partnerships and business exchanges. Most of the BPAP member companies still offer call center services but treat this as just their entry point to get a biggest portion of the clients' more profitable non-voice services. Call centers may be low-end and low-margin, but for the Philippines it meant an employment boon. So, BPAP officials noted that the growing local BPO industry should not only translate to higher economic growth, but also more jobs. In the call center industry lone, some 60,000 jobs will be up for filling in 2011. The BPO industry has just released its latest roadmap, wherein its revenues and workforce are targeted to reach $25 billion and 1.3 million, respectively, from $9 billion and 500,000 today.